BEATIFICATION OF ARCHBISHOP ROMERO,
MAY 23, 2015
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Super Martyrio is publishing for the first time in
English, Spanish and Italian the first national homily of Blessed Oscar Romero.
It was delivered on August 6, 1976, six months before his appointment as
archbishop of San Salvador, for the feast of the Transfiguration, when
Salvadorans celebrate their patron, the Divine Savior of the World.
Thirty-nine
years later, El Salvador yearns for its great transfiguration from crime and
violence to peace and social harmony. Many saw (albeit fleetingly) the model of
coexistence so desired during Romero’s beatification in May, when unity, the
spirit of volunteerism, and great positivity prevailed for the historic event
and gang murders stopped for the event weekend. This Romero homily imposes the same
contrast between “what is” and “what could be.”
The Romero that
speaks to us in this homily is a moderate traditionalist who still holds back
the bold denunciations that will characterize the coming years, but we sense
that he is on the verge of taking a giant and decisive step in his ministry. He
speaks of Christ “the Liberator.” Most importantly, Romero paints the picture
that his beatification embodied for a brief shining moment: of a holy people, who
stands out by its nobility and asserts its spiritual heritage from Christ the
Savior himself. (Therefore, it is so appropriate that Romero’s beatification took
place alongside the Monument to the Divine Savior—Church authorities announced this weekend that Romero’s relics would accompany this week’s patronal celebrations.)
While Romero's
beatification gave us a foretaste of the social peace that is possible, Blessed
Romero from 1976 preaches to us about how to make it a permanent reality. It is
“in the heart of our own faith and our
authentic national spirituality,” Romero tells his countrymen, “that we can find the light and the force that the Divine Savior offers
for the effective liberation, promotion and transformation of our country.”
Romero appeals
to nationalism and civic duty to spiritedly encourage a return to the values
of old Christendom and Catholic civilization as a model that should be
adapted to the requirements of the Salvadoran reality, but one which presents a
viable alternative to the projects of modernity: “We do not have to go begging to other, atheistic sources, or to ones of
non-transcendent inspiration, for the concept of our liberation. From our national origin, God has favored us
with His true philosophy.”
Now, let us
read about God’s plan to transfigure El Salvador and the world as related by
Blessed Oscar Romero in this previously unpublished homily. It may well disclose a message that is
applicable to the El Salvador and the world of today.
The Divine Savior:
Who He is, what His
liberation consists of, and how His work reaches us.
Blessed Oscar
A. Romero
August 6, 1976
I. Who the Divine Savior Is
A Cradle Song
It occurs to me
that the Gospel of the Transfiguration of the Lord, which we have heard
proclaimed has, for us Salvadorans, the nostalgic sweetness of a cradle song.
And in the light of that Gospel, our August celebrations recover the sentiment
of a return to our birth home.
Yes; thus were
we born into Christian civilization under the sign of the Transfiguration of
the Lord. His divine face, bright as the sun, and the snowy brilliance of his
vestments, were the first Christian rays that illuminated the opulent geography
of our fatherland upon its emergence from its cloudy prehistory, when, in 1528,
Captain Pedro de Alvarado, after putting his conquest under the protection of
the Blessed Trinity, founded the Capital of our Republic and baptized it with
the incomparable name of the Holy Savior (“San Salvador”).
Commenting on
the privileged origin of our Christian history amidst the splendor of our first
National Eucharistic Congress, the Servant of God, Pope Pius XII, observed with
theological wisdom: “We would like to
think that it was not only the wholesome mercy of Pedro de Alvarado which, in
the dawn of the Conquest, so exaltedly baptized you, but more than anything it
was the very Providence of God.” (H.H. Pius XII’s Radio message on the
occasion of the closing of the 1st National Eucharistic Congress of the
Republic of El Salvador, November 26, 1942.)
A Baptism Gift
Indeed, it was
the very Providence of God, which baptized and imprinted this unknown land with
an indelible and unmistakable character through the splendor of the most
luminous manifestation of the Gospel.
It was a Gospel
that came to us enriched with the exquisite essence of Eastern theology and
liturgy, and echoing with the prayers, the skirmishes and the victories of the
Church that was the creator and guardian of Western civilization. For, this
August 6 celebration that Spain bequeathed to us was first celebrated with
great splendor as the principal summer feast during the Fifth Century in the
East in honor of Christ the King, and Pope Callixtus III adopted it in 1457 as
a movable feast in Western liturgy, to celebrate the Christian victory at the
Battle of Belgrade, which drove back the Islamic incursions.
This is the way
God’s providence has prepared the long road for the Church to reach us to begin
its task of evangelization here, under the sign of the Transfiguration. It is a sign of fullness, the fullness of
Christian Kerygma (proclamation) and
catechesis, delivered to us with the splendid vision of Mt. Tabor. For in it
God presents us, in a wonderful synthesis, like a seed or fermentation, the
complete revelation of His divine plan to save to the world through the Son of
His contentment. For that reason, I believe that the best service an humble
preacher of the Gospel can pay the fatherland on this solemn occasion in which
the family returns fondly, is to review and to confront, whether our religious
and national reality is being built on the three solid coordinates of the
Christian faith that are illuminated with the national mystery of the feast of
our patron: Christ, His Salvation, and His Church.
Only a divine
being could gain the standing and merit of God for the human pain and blood
that would be the price of redemption.
The Divine
Savior is the optimal man to introduce into this luminous picture of the
Transfiguration. In Him, God reveals through the divine language of signs, His
merciful purpose to save the world by means of His beloved Son. Moses and
Elijah represent the promises and prophecies through which God had heralded and
prepared humanity’s great liberation with portentous messages and actions.
Peter, James and John will witnesses the fulfillment of God’s promises in their
lifetimes. They are there, tempering
their faith and their hope, to attend and to attest to the world to the painful
scandal of the Cross. For that reason,
when the vision ends, the Lord swears them to secrecy regarding the revelation,
“until the Son of Man is raised from the
dead.” (Mark 9:9.) In an undetected paradox, the luminous vision of Mt.
Tabor proves a tragic foreshadowing of the bloody Transfiguration at Calvary.
Only His Liberation Saves Us
This is how our
country received, together with name of God (“El Salvador;” The Savior), the
authentic revelation of God’s true salvation through the Prophets and the
Apostles. We do not have to go begging to other, atheistic sources, or to ones
of non-transcendent inspiration, for the concept of our liberation. From our national origin, God has favored us
with His true philosophy. And it is there, in the heart of our own faith and of
our authentic national spirituality, that we can find the light and the force
that the Divine Savior offers for the effective liberation, promotion and
transformation of our country.
II. What His Liberation Consists of
What, then, is the liberation that the
Divine Savior of mankind sponsors and promotes?
The authorized
depositories of His thought, the Pope and the Bishops, met two years ago, in
the world-wide Synod of 1974, to hold up that divine thought against the tragic
reality of our present world, “with a
pastoral accent”—Paul VI remarks in
his exhortation regarding the evangelization of the current world— “resonant with the voice of the millions of
sons and daughters of the Church who make up those peoples [of the Third
World]. Peoples, as we know, engaged with
all their energy in the effort and struggle to overcome everything which
condemns them to remain on the margin of life: famine, chronic disease,
illiteracy, poverty, injustices in international relations and especially in
commercial exchanges, situations of economic and cultural neo-colonialism
sometimes as cruel as the old political colonialism,” etc. (EVANGELII NUNTIANDI, 30)
And the Bishops
recognized the duty of the Church to denounce, and to help bring about the
complete liberation of these millions of human beings. But the same Bishops
offered at that historical meeting, “the
enlightening principles for a proper understanding of the importance and
profound meaning of liberation, such as it was proclaimed and achieved by Jesus
of Nazareth and such as it is preached by the Church” (Ibid., 31.)
The liberation
of Christ and of His Church is not reduced to the dimension of a purely temporal
project. It does not reduce its objectives to an anthropocentric perspective:
to a material well-being or to initiatives of a political or social, economic
or cultural order, only.
Much less can
it be a liberation that supports or is supported by violence.
“[I]f this were so, the Church would lose her
fundamental meaning. Her message of liberation would no longer have any
originality and would easily be open to monopolization and manipulation by
ideological systems and political parties. She would have no more authority to
proclaim freedom as in the name of God.” (Ibid., 32)
The liberation
of Christ and of His Church is, by contrast, one that includes the whole
person, in all of one’s dimensions, including in our openness to the Absolute,
which is God. And in “associating herself with those who are
working ... for [liberation], the
Church [does not] restrict her
mission only to the religious field and dissociate herself from man's temporal
problems. [But] she reaffirms the
primacy of her spiritual vocation and [does not] replace the proclamation of the kingdom by the proclamation of forms of
human liberation”. (Ibid., 34.) Her
best contribution is to announce salvation in Jesus Christ; a salvation that
requires conversion in one’s heart. The Church agrees that is necessary to
change existing structures for others that are more humane and more just; but
she is convinced that these new structures will “soon become inhuman if the inhuman inclinations of the human heart are
not made wholesome, if those who live in these structures or who rule them do
not undergo a conversion of heart and of outlook.” (Ibid., 36.)
Arbitrator of Our Conflicts
How beautiful
this 6th of August would be if, upon leaving this family home, after sharing a
sincere return to our origins, we would carry in our souls an intention to
understand each other better from the place where the hand of Providence has
placed each one of us. If the men of the government and the shepherds of the
Church, if capital and labor, if city dwellers and those from the countryside,
government undertakings and those of private enterprise [applause]… If we would
all really let the Divine Savior of the World, the Patron of the Nation,
provide the national transformation that we urgently need. If He would be the inspiration for and the
referee of all our conflicts, be the protagonist of all the national
transformations that we urgently need, for an integral liberation that only He
can furnish.
III. How His Salvation reaches us
Christ Lives in His Church
Christ lives.
And he is bringing about the liberation of the world. The Church, founded by
Him, maintains the mystery of His incarnation and His salvation among the
nations. The light of Christ shines within the Church.
The
Transfiguration story also reveals to us the mystery of the Church and its
mission in our national history. Saint Peter, the first Pope chosen for this
newborn Church, describes to us the mission of the Church in the poetic symbol
of a lamp, which carries the light of the prophets. When it is put in contact with the Christ of
the Transfiguration, this lamp becomes more luminous because the fulfillment of
all the prophets is inherent in Him, and he takes it to the paths of men “until the day dawns and the morning star
rises in your hearts” (2 Peter 1:19).
Its mission is “to bring the light of Christ to all men, a
light brightly visible on the countenance of the Church.” (LUMEN GENTIUM,
1). She brings us to the true Christ. We cannot forget that the 6th of August
is an encounter of our country with God made possible thanks to the Church. The
creed of the Church is the starting point of our faith. We have received our
faith in Jesus from the Church—not from philosophical or physiological
criticism. Any other Christ and any
other liberation that is not the Christ and is not the liberation preached by the
Church, will always be an illusory Christ and liberation, as “historic” as some
wish to call them. As St. Paul told the
Galatians in the name of the Church, “If
any man preacheth unto you any gospel other than that which ye received, let
him be anathema.” (Gal. 1:9.)
Visible sign of Our Encounter with Him
And, at the
same time that the Church is the bearer of the true light of Christ, she also
is the goal of the evangelization of the peoples. Because Evangelization
preaches, “the search for God Himself
through prayer ... but also through communion with the visible sign of the
encounter with God which is the Church of Jesus Christ; and this communion in
its turn is expressed by the application of those other signs of Christ living
and acting in the Church which are the sacraments.” (EVANGELII NUNTIANDI,
28) Thus, Paul VI tears down the
dichotomy in certain pastoral teachings of Protestant inspiration which
purports to juxtapose “evangelization” against “sacramentalization,” in his
masterful exhortation, EVANGELII NUNTIANDI.
Our return to
the source has also brought to us to this happy encounter with our Church,
which has brought us like a gift from Providence this divine relation so laden
with meaning, and offers us a safe haven in our encounter with the living and
redeeming Christ. This is a challenge to us who represent that Church—Bishops,
priests and religious—to become better suited every day for a vocation which
has the transcendental mission of making the face of the Church shine on our
mother country. The worst misfortune would be to conceal that brilliance,
camouflaging or showing our glorious priestly and religious identity to be
victims of an internal crisis. This moment also inspires honesty and confidence
to approach the Government and the People, to repeat a demand of the Church,
formulated this way by the Second Vatican Council: “[The Church] asks of you only liberty, the liberty to
believe and to preach her faith, the freedom to love her God and serve Him, the
freedom to live and to bring to men her message of life. Do not fear her. She
is made after the image of her Master, whose mysterious action does not
interfere with your prerogatives but heals everything human of its fatal weakness,
transfigures it and fills it with hope, truth and beauty.” (TO THE RULERS—Messages of the Council).
As a single heart
In truth, more
than the mercy of Pedro de Alvarado, it was the Providence of God which so
exaltedly baptized us with the name of The Savior (“El Salvador”). And, more
than a name, He gave us a message which is the summary of His divine plan to
save to the world, in His beloved Son. For that reason, these August
celebrations seem to us like a convivial return to the family house, of one who
leans over to imprint a kiss of faith, of gratitude and of renewed commitment,
on the cradle of one’s childhood and on the font of one’s Baptism. The
shepherds of the Church, the Supreme Authorities of the State who ennoble
themselves by leading their People in this tribute to the Celestial Patron, and
the whole People of El Salvador, as if forming a single heart and a single
voice that prays and adores (which is the heart of the nation), fall to their
knees before the altar of this national Eucharist, prepared to receive a new
sacrifice for His people and the ratification of His merciful alliance with us,
from the DIVINE SAVIOR OF THE WORLD.
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